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Review: "Doctor Who: The End of Time, Part One" on BBC America

December 28, 2009 | 7:51
am

Saturday night, the night after
Christmas, was the U.S. premiere of Part 1 of "The End of
Time," the first half of the last adventure of David Tennant's
Tenth Doctor, as in "Doctor Who." (Shown here on BBC
America, the episode premiered on Christmas Day in England, where, as
my colleague Mary McNamara wrote from London, "They take their
Christmas TV very seriously, fortunately, because everything else is
closed on Xmas Day.") The Tennant Years, which began Christmas
Day 2005, are coming to a close, along with the Russell T Davies
Years, which began that March, when writer Davies brought the series
back to television after a 16-year hiatus, one lonely TV movie
notwithstanding.

This is, in its small but real way,
epochal, and as a fan of the show, I have awaited this moment with
trepidation and excitement and a concern both for the characters and
for the real people who make them go, on the page and before and behind the
camera -- not wanting it to end, wanting the end to be good. That the
Tennant Doctor would die and regenerate into Eleventh Doctor Matt
Smith, with Steven Moffat replacing Davies as the show runner, has
been known for quite some time, and the Doctor himself has been aware
of his impending demise since it was prophesied in the "Planet
of the Dead" special earlier this year. This has introduced a
novel note into his character, one of fear for his own life, of
self-preservation and self-indulgence.

"Even
if I change, it feels like dying," he tells his new traveling
companion, Wilf (Bernard Cribbins), grandfather of last traveling
companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), who currently remembers
nothing of the Doctor. (Her brain will burn up if she does, but there
are always ways around these things; when you write the rules, you
can also write the exceptions.) "Everything I am dies. Some new
man goes sauntering away. And I'm dead."
That this is only sort of true, to judge even by the transformation
by which Davies turned Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston into Tenth
Doctor Tennant, is less important than the fact that it resonates
with our own feelings about this parting: Here on Earth, the soul is, practically speaking,
indivisible from the body, and Matt Smith's Doctor will no more be
David Tennant's than Tennant's was Tom Baker's or Baker's was Jon
Pertwee's, however many memories they share. This transference began as a way to keep the show alive, but it has been Davies'
method throughout the series to take its established conventions and
reckon their psychic cost.

The Doctor began Saturday's
penultimate hour swaggering, arriving on the snowy planet of the
psychically sensitive Oud in a straw hat and a lei, having taken some
detours on his way to answering a summons issued at the end of "The
Waters of Mars." (He is not ready to go into whatever good night
regenerating Time Lords go.) But the arrogance left him as the Oud
revealed "a shadow is falling on creation, something vast is
stirring in the dark" -- something even bigger than the "reality
bomb" Davros and the Daleks meant to unleash on all of creation
at the end of the last season.

Melodramatic and busy and loud, with a few breaks for comedy, it was
a kitchen-sink episode, cluttered with events and characters
(including a power-mad billionaire and his daughter and a pair of alien technicians) to the point that it was sometimes
hard to get a fix on the Doctor, so far more acted upon than acting. Much of it was just getting the
pins lined up, of course, for next week's final confrontation. Davies likes to get the gang together at Christmas --
last year, he had all the Doctor's traveling companions back to
co-pilot the Tardis -- and there is no way he wouldn't call
back the troops for Tennant's farewell. It has been known for some
time that the finale would involve John Simm's supposedly dead Master,
whose return was foretold by the trailers that have been in
circulation since summer, as was that of Tate's Donna. (Of the likely
old faces, only Freema Agyeman's Martha Jones is missing from the
published cast list.)

Though Donna Noble was in and out of
the episode, always just around the corner from the Doctor, it was
Wilf who became his final traveling companion. Like Donna, and pretty
much everyone else the Doctor gets close to, his presence is not
accidental; the universe has thrust him upon the Doctor like a
magician forcing a card. Destiny is a powerful narrative device -- it
says that life has purpose and strikes the place in us that wants
that to be so -- and Davies has used it again and again. Just so, it's the web of special relationships that surround the
Doctor that makes tolerable, and navigable, the awful vastness of
space and time. He's a Time Lord who needs people, and he needs those people back around him for his death to have the proper effect and meaning.

By the episode's end, things seemed ready
to begin. The Master returned to life in a set piece out of J.K.
Rowling, gibbering, ravenous and able to leap tall buildings at a
single bound but eventually coming back down to Earth and using some particularly handy alien technology to
turn all humanity (save Wilf and Donna) into reflections of himself.
And there was, revealed in the final seconds, the return of the Time Lords, funny
hats and all, whom Davies had killed off as practically his first
official act as the new shepherd of "Doctor Who" -- which made their appearance in his swan song all but inevitable, though completely unexpected.

Now, on to Part 2, which airs here Jan. 2. I remain anxious.

But first a note to BBC America: Your "bugs"
-- a seven-line ad for Part 2 ran down the right
side of the screen throughout, as ads for other upcoming shows popped up to the left -- are particularly distracting, no
different really from having a small child blocking the screen and
insisting you look at this thing he has found. You can't give
yourself over to another world while billboards from this one keep
interrupting the view. (I am not the only professional watcher to
have felt this.) Americans will have to wait for the DVD to properly see "The
End of Time."